are here. Tensions are growing; differences in culture and perspective are showing, and because the stakes are very high (as all new parents are warned), things that could in the past have been solved with a drink and hands thrown in the air now become the critical foci of full-scale diplomatic incidents, with all of the seriousness that this implies. Beneath the veneers of anger that hang in the air lie deep reservoirs of regret that all of this somehow can’t be made to go away—for the child’s sake.

Everyone wishes at one time or another that reality was much simpler, that people were really all exactly the same, that life was a totalitarian system that left one with now choices and alternatives, so that no moral ambiguities ever sat in judgment of the well-intentioned.